SETI crowd sources search for ET

SETI crowd sources search for ET

JacobShiach

The SETI institute and Zooniverse have just released a project called SETI Live which is seeking crowd sourced help in classifying signals coming in from the Allen Telescope Array. They are hoping that with the help of citizen scientists they can classify bands they’ve had to skip with their computer searches.

In order to avoid uneven and unknown completion of signal classification, SonATA skips over many “crowded” frequency bands. We are literally blind to any ET signals that might be arriving at those frequencies. Overall, it’s only a few percent of the entire 1 to 10 GHz frequency range we are trying to explore systematically, but those might be the most important frequencies!

Faster processors will help, but we really need to better understand what signals are in those crowded bands, and what is generating them, so that we can help SonATA do a better job of classifying and finding any really interesting candidates buried underneath all this clutter. That’s where you come in. We want to use your eyes and brains to help us work through these crowded bands. We want you to tell us about all the signals/patterns you can see, and why you think they may be from ET technologies rather than our own.

The thing that makes this project a bit different from Zooniverses other projects, is that you get to work on the data live as it’s coming from the ATA and possibly effect the planets the array targets.